


Happening Everywhere

by scioscribe



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: F/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), reunited after years apart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:29:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22311784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: He didn’t even know that she was still alive.There was no reason why it should matter to him one way or the other.  Their falling-out had been—comprehensive, to say the least, and he hadn’t seen her since then.
Relationships: Carol Danvers/Yon-Rogg
Comments: 5
Kudos: 145
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	Happening Everywhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



He hadn’t known that he would see her again.

The statistics had been rolling in for weeks, an unending banner of names and numbers unfurling across the computer on his wrist, and all that nauseating specificity could not drown out the forming consensus: half the universe had been lost.

It had been Thanos, they said, the Mad Titan—who had boasted, for a time, a key ally among the more recalcitrant Kree.

Yon-Rogg had known Ronan; they had even been children together. Ronan had been intense, even then, with his eyes like sharpened points of flint and his face twisted up with yearning: Ronan had always burned to solve every problem immediately, brutally, eternally. But they had had the same teachers, the same commanders, the same Supreme Intelligence. They had both been favored sons, once. In fact, it was Ronan, really, who had remained loyal to the Supreme Intelligence after Yon-Rogg had reluctantly chosen compromise. Ronan had been the standard-bearer for all the beliefs Yon-Rogg had still held in his heart.

And he had contributed to all this. Or tried to—he wasn’t clear on exactly what had been done when. And it would admittedly be like Ronan to fail even in his bad intentions.

Not that Yon-Rogg was feeling petty.

But he had found out all that about Ronan, and for just a moment, he had thought of her, a thing he had spent years trying to suppress: _I’ll have to tell her she was right after all._

The idea of that admission was in his head as a self-contained thing, glassy and whole, like a marble, and then it cracked: he didn’t even know that she was still alive.

There was no reason why it should matter to him one way or the other. Their falling-out had been—comprehensive, to say the least, and he hadn’t seen her since then.

Vers.

Carol.

No, she couldn’t be gone. With his own _eyes_ , he had seen her burning like a supernova, more incandescent than any star in the galaxy. How could some brutish Titan, some fanatic, have put an end to all that?

But there was no way to know to a certainty. And in the meantime, his world was in chaos.

After years of glory and then years of ignominy— _he gave his blood to the traitor Vers_ —Yon-Rogg found himself, remarkably, doing something akin to civil service. He worked to set up stable energy-distribution chains that would continue to power the cities with even the most limited workforce to maintain them. He recalled off-world Kree, reuniting what families could still be made whole. And when Carol Danvers, neither recalled nor expected, returned home, he was, of all things, in a hydroponic orchard, combing through a past-season harvest grown wild, seeing what could be salvaged. The sun was hot on the back of his neck.

And there she was, striding towards him.

“This isn’t where I ever thought I’d find you,” she said, with no preamble. “Farming? Wow.”

He just looked at her, his tongue feeling clumsy and dry. Then he said, “I prefer to think of it as resource management.”

“Of course you do.” She plucked a clutch of striped berries and began to eat them one by one, popping them into her mouth like some kind of candy. It was only then that he noticed her fingers were trembling just slightly. “I’m checking on different worlds to see how everyone is getting on. Hala seems to be in better shape than a lot of places—that ought to make you happy. I heard a couple of people giving you credit for that, actually. If you’re not careful, they’ll make you Chief Farmer for life, stick you in a pair of overalls, change your name to Jethro.”

“I don’t understand ninety percent of that,” Yon-Rogg said, “but I assume it was more for your amusement than mine.”

“I would have familiarized you more with Earth culture during our time together if you’d, you know, let me remember it.” She offered him a berry.

He took it. It was warm from the sun and her fingers, and it had the same tart-sour taste of all its kind: very few fruits on Hala had much to offer in terms of sweetness.

That had, strangely, been one of the first things Carol had seemed to find unfamiliar about her supposed home-world. Her lips had always puckered slightly when she tasted things, as if she had expected something completely different.

“So—do you need anything?” she said now, looking at him with those familiar dark eyes.

He’d once seen a bottomless reservoir of need there, one that he had tried to plaster over; then, for a long time, he'd remembered her more by her last look at him, an expression of confidence and unruffled disgust.

Now—now, he wasn’t sure.

“You didn’t have to come to me,” he said.

“Pretty sure I just came to Hala.”

“Here, specifically,” Yon-Rogg said, gesturing around at the greenhouse. “In this _exact_ spot.”

“Of all the gin joints in all the cities in all the world, right?”

The translator chip had trouble with _gin_ and garbled it, but he understood the rest. “More or less.”

“Less. Trust me: less.” She leaned against the wide, smooth trunk of a tree, classification 13-01, and folded her arms, looking at him. She was more relaxed now than he could ever remember her having been before; well, assurance had that effect on a person. Or so he seemed to recollect.

Yet he knew, uncomfortably well, how that assurance could fracture. He could—destabilize her. Potentially. But for what purpose?

An old reflex, looking for weaknesses, looking for ways to turn any one thing to serve the collective. He still believed in that, but not with her. Not when she’d burned so brightly for him even in her absence, like an after-image left on his eyes by the sun.

“You took your time getting here,” he said after a moment.

“It’s not my favorite destination spot.”

“No, I’m sure you wanted to check on your friends the Skrulls.”

“Want some bourbon with those bitters? Did you talk about your jealousy issues in your little encounter sessions with the Supreme Intelligence?”

Yon-Rogg turned away, examining some herbs that ought to winter well. “As a matter of fact, and not that it’s any of your business—even remotely—but I haven’t met with the Supreme Intelligence since my return. I passed on your deliberately incendiary news—”

“Must have been tough to have someone say you can’t just take over whatever world you happen to want that week.”

“You realize that your unilateral overturning of an authorized government makes you, in effect, a terrorist.”

“Aww, you’re scared of me?” She’d risen up from where she was lounging against the tree, and Yon-Rogg couldn’t read the new, dangerous brightness in her eyes, nothing like the wary, amused condescension she’d had facing him down mere minutes before. “You haven’t met with the Supreme Intelligence since you gave it my message. That’s what you’re telling me. What, it decided you were unworthy? Banned you from the hallowed halls of having electrodes hooked up to your skull?”

No. For once, in all her guessing, she’d genuinely come wide of the mark.

He looked at her, and the newly close cut of her hair, which he hadn’t imagined in all those long years of imagination but liked; he looked at the colors of it, streaked in shades of gold, bright as the berry-juice still painting her mouth. In spending all his time thinking how she’d bested him, he’d forgotten how he’d failed her; he’d neglected to envision how easily he could do it again. And then he’d thought she was dead. If there was a point to keeping his secrets—beyond keeping his dignity, which was by this point scarred at best—he wasn’t sure what it was.

He said, “The last time I saw you was not—in a way—the last time I saw you.”

“In a way,” Carol repeated.

Yon-Rogg sighed. “The Supreme Intelligence took on your... Please don’t make me say it.”

She didn’t. She met his mouth with her own instead, curling her fingers into his jaw and scalp, a bruising contrast to her gentler kiss; he let out an unwanted gasp at the sheer, hot solidity of her, her _presence_ after years of absence. Her lips were roughened, as if she’d been biting at them, and she tasted tart from the berries. It seemed inconceivable that after all this time, she should taste like home, even though it shouldn’t have surprised him that they had a battlefield’s combination of strangeness and worn familiarity.

He had slept with others since his time with her, of course, but none of them had been like her. They hadn't even been like Vers.

“I want it on the record,” he said, when the kiss had ended, “that I only saw you _once_.”

She was unruffled. “Before all that happened, you didn’t really know me. You just knew the version of me you figured would be useful.” She looked around at the dangling plants and seemed to breathe in, taking in the scent of all the vegetation around them, the growing things and the half-rotted ones. “Seems like you’ve been useful lately.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve all needed to be twice as useful as we were—and for half the good. Hold up a whole society, because you can’t simply let it crumble, but do it for a fraction of its former glory.” He rubbed the leaves of one of the plants between his fingers, feeling the jagged edges of it, faintly haired with silver. He resented being sure that she had left a much wider mark on his heart than he had on hers. He didn’t, he decided magnanimously, resent that she would never have seen _him_ when conversing with the Supreme Intelligence; he resented instead that she’d made him see that there was no reason she ever should have. That he had not, in fact, proved especially deserving of her admiration or even her respect.

He felt like something inside him had been set spinning at a cockeyed angle. He said, “I’m glad to know you’re still alive.”

“Yeah. Obviously I did actually come here to see if you were too.”

“To let bygones be bygones?”

She shook her head, giving him, for a long time, nothing but a silent no, and then she said, “But I’m happy you’re still alive. And, against some of my better judgment, happy this place seems to be doing well. Relatively.”

“You won’t stay,” he said—without, he thought, noticeable expression. Even without the sound of a question.

“No. Not here, not again. And even besides that, there are too many other places that need help. Way too many. But I could come back.” She tapped the base of one hard-shelled pot. “Check on how this year’s crop’s coming in.”

“Full of weeds,” Yon-Rogg said bluntly.

“Or you could come with me.” She tilted her head. “Now that I think about it, though, I don’t really have a ship. It’s not like I need one.”

“Braggart.” He was cheering up, though. “I could meet you somewhere—on occasion.”

She studied him, evidently considering that last part, and then nodded. “Your home’s still here.”

He wasn’t going to apologize for that, and he was somewhat annoyed that she apparently didn’t need him to, which left him with no moral stand to take at all.

But she had come back, and she would come back again. And he wanted to make this moment last longer—even through the night, if she would stay—and he wanted, much to his consternation, to make her smile, because it had been so long since he last could. In those days, he had sometimes scolded her for it; he wouldn't now.

“If I left for good,” he said, “who would be Chief Farmer?”


End file.
